Strange But True: March 7, 2019

* It is still not known who made the following sage observation: “The difference between ‘involvement’ and ‘commitment’ is like an eggs-and-ham breakfast: The chicken was ‘involved’; the pig was ‘committed.’”

* Those who study such things say that if you were (for reasons unspecified) to eat the liver of a polar bear, you’d die. The amount of vitamin A stored in that organ constitutes a fatal dose for humans.

* You might be surprised to learn that high-quality opals can be more valuable than diamonds.

* John Tyler, born March 29, 1790, was the 10th president of the United States. He was married twice and had a total of 15 children. These children, collectively, were witness to a surprisingly large swath of American history. The oldest, Mary Tyler Jones, was born in 1815, the year that saw the end of the War of 1812; the youngest, Pearl Tyler Ellis, survived until 1947, two years after the end of World War II.

* The next time you’re planning a trip to Indiana, keep in mind that in that state it is illegal to talk behind a person’s back or engage in “spiteful gossiping.”

* In 1915, the average annual income for a family in the United States was $687, the equivalent of $17,088 today.

* In 1889, a magazine called The Literary Digest made the following prediction: “The ordinary ‘horseless carriage’ is at present a luxury for the wealthy, and although its price will probably fall in the future, it will never, of course, come into as common use as the bicycle.”

* Squirrels are wonderful foresters. Every year, thousands of trees grow from caches of nuts and acorns that squirrels forgot about.

Thought for the Day

“An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.”

--Gilbert Keith Chesterton

(c) 2019 King Features Synd., Inc.